It’s the ending, really, that spoils “The Cowboys.” Otherwise, it’s a good-to-fine Western, with a nice, sly performance by Roscoe Lee Browne as the trail cook, and the usual solid Wayne performance. The scenes along the way of the kids learning to be cowboys are good, warm fun, and it’s a shame they had to go for the unlikely, violent, and totally contrived last thirty minutes.
Roger Ebert